The Way To Rainy Mountain Sparknotes

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The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday was first published in 1976. The book contains many old Kiowa legends told to the author by his father. Telling these legends is a way that the Kiowa people assured that their heritage lived on. Momaday’s writing of the legends gives the culture a more permanent remembrance. Preservation of their cultural tradition was very important to the Kiowa people.
Arlene A. Elder points out that “the book’s linguistic structure, established in the first section and later subverted, that, in my view, creates a dialogic performance experience for the reader and narrator, that has drawn the most consistent attention of critics, most of them noting the increasing interrelationship of different voices present …show more content…

Clements asserts that N. Scott Momaday incorporates a folk historical sense into his book The Way to Rainy Mountain. Clements says that “ the writer using the folk viewpoint perceives his or her work as part of a continuing artistic heritage which begins with his culture’s oral literature, owes its primary survival to oral tradition, and continues to, or through, his or her own fiction, poems, plays or essays” (66). Momaday also talks about this oral tradition. He explains in the preface of The Way to Rainy Mountain how “The Way to Rainy Mountain was first published twenty-five years ago. One should not be surprised, I suppose, that is has remained vital and immediate, for that is the nature of the story. And this is particularly true of the oral tradtion, which exists in a dimension of timelessness” (ix). This idea of Clements supports the idea that Momaday’s father telling him the legends and him writing them down helps to preserves the cultural heritage of the Kiowa people. He states that while “Momaday never experienced Kiowa culture on a day-to-day basis for long periods of time” with the exception of House Made of Dawn, “his work has been informed primarily by his perception of his Kiowa heritage” (68). Momaday’s perception of the Kiowa heritage comes from the legends told to him by his father. One of these legends reveals that the Kiowa people “came one by one into the world through a hollow log” (16). A person’s heritage is one of the many defining factors of their

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